Area and street lighting is one of the most important elements of a city's infrastructure. For such extensive lighting installations it is desirable to know the locations of individual luminaires for maintenance and other purposes involving planning and billing. In many instances, maintenance and installation crews installing luminaires record the luminaire locations by their GPS coordinates. The GPS coordinates are often provided by GPS receivers carried by the installation crews as part of a crew's personal data assistant. It occasionally happens that luminaires are moved and their new location coordinates are not recorded. This introduces bookkeeping errors and increases the city's overhead in maintaining the lighting infrastructure. It may also result in incorrectly locating and therefore misinterpreting data provided by non-illumination functions that are associated with, and physically proximate to, the luminaire.
It is also desirable for infrastructure managers to know if and when a luminaire has received a substantial physical shock so that the luminaire may be examined for damage and also to have a record of the time and characterization of the event for summarizing the facts of the incident causing the physical shock.
A need therefore exists for a luminaire associate that will report and record physical shocks and their characteristics and also alert infrastructure management to its relocation.